The Multi-Brand Problem Figma Finally Solved

You've seen this problem. You build a design system for your company. Clean, consistent, works great. Then brand number two needs it. Different colors, same components. Easy enough - you duplicate the library, swap the tokens, done.

Then brand three shows up. And four. And suddenly you're maintaining six versions of the same button component. You fix a bug in the core system, and now you get to manually port that fix to five other libraries.
It's like those old "choose your own adventure" books where every story starts from page 1, but then splits into completely separate paths. Except you're the author trying to fix a typo on page 1, and now you have to find and fix it in seventeen different branching storylines. This is not scaling. This is a maintenance nightmare.

Figma's new Extended Collections let teams extend your core system with their own themes while staying linked to the source. You update the core button, it propagates to all six brands automatically. They keep their colors, you keep one source of truth.

It's a small feature that solves a huge operations problem. The kind of thing that sounds boring until you're the one managing design across multiple brands, and then it's the difference between sustainable and drowning.